How can you identify a person’s eye color from a heel bone?

In 2004, Nici Vance, Ph.D., made a startling discovery: the remains of people who had died in Oregon as far back as 70 years ago - whose bones had been stored in the state medical examiner’s office for decades - they were all nameless. None had been identified. 

Now the state forensic anthropologist and coordinator of the Human Identification Program for the Oregon State Medical Examiner's office (a division of the Oregon State Police), Vance, then a forensic scientist, came across the remains when doing an inventory of the office’s holdings as it relocated to a new building. 

She found skeletonized remains in the storage room, on dusty shelves, and in a few cases in the freezers. Some were whole skeletons, and others were just a few bones. The paper documentation on them was scant. 

The final tally was more than 120 people. “For us, that was a vast amount,” Vance recalls. “Oregon's rural. We're not a huge state. I found that to be alarming.”

The degraded bone samples were hard to extract DNA from. They also weren’t a priority, considering that new forensic cases appeared all over the state every day. To catch criminals, provide peace of mind, and bring closure to families - the newest cases had to be prioritized over unidentified remains from years ago. 

“They were true mysteries,” Vance says.

The elegance of the skeleton

Vance spent much of her career as a forensic scientist before taking on her current role in 2018. Born and raised in Montana, she trained as an anthropologist at the University of Montana and Portland State University. But she was drawn to bones, so it is no surprise that she ended up with a Ph.D. in anatomy from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. “I find human bone to be elegant tissue,” she says. “It's got curves and grooves and fissures, and it grows. It's not this dead scaffolding in our body. It is something that lives and repairs itself. It's alive. It can break, and it can heal.” 

Upon returning to the Oregon, she began splitting her time between the crime lab and the medical examiner’s office which provides analysis and pathological services for all 36 Oregon counties. Death investigations occur routinely throughout Oregon, and exams and autopsies are often performed on those deaths deemed suspicious discovered in the state.. Many of those cases, based on the circumstances are received at the Clackamas facility.

The first step in identifying a person is to create a biological profile. You can tell a lot about a person’s life from their bones - age, biological sex (if an adult), some injuries or illnesses, whether they did a lot of manual labor. They may have dental work or surgical implants. But there’s so much you can’t tell from the exterior of bones. Many injuries and illnesses leave no trace on the skeleton. And there’s no indication of more detailed identifying characteristics, such as eye, hair, or skin color. “We're really starting out at a deficit with these cases,” Vance says. 

Oregon also has a variety of landscapes—heavily forested, sandy coastal, high snowy elevation, hot dry valley. It’s crisscrossed by rivers, streams, and highways. It has urban, rural, and suburban communities. And it has many microclimates, making it a forensically complex place to work. 

“Those variable conditions affect the amount of skeletal remains that we might find and the condition that they might be in, and the decomposition rates will vary,” Vance says. “It’s very difficult to determine how long someone has been deceased. Someone who is laying out in the middle of a field in bright sunlight is going to decompose and skeletonize quite a bit differently than someone who was up in the woods at elevation in intermittent sunshine.”

That’s when going inside the bone to the DNA becomes key. But first DNA had to be extracted from what are largely degraded samples. “This can be very difficult,” she admits. “Some of the cases that I work on are extremely old.”

Solving the case of Baby Boy Doe

A cold case out of Oregon involving a male individual who had gone missing after a fishing trip in 1998 would be the first case solved using a new DNA technology - Kintelligence.   

The case was re-opened in 2020, when Vance sent a single tooth to DNA Labs International for analysis. "They were very well versed in extracting degraded bone and decomposed tissue samples and we liked the fact that they had developed some robust methodologies," Vance says. 

In the GEDmatch analysis, DNA Labs hit upon the family members of a man, Kenneth Heasley. He drowned in 1998 along with his friend, Gary Gelsinger when their boat capsized. Both their remains washed ashore soon after, but only Gelsinger had an ID on him. It took nearly a quarter-century before forensic technology advanced enough to identify Heasley’s remains.

An even older cold case was solved with the help of Parabon Nanolabs, the National Center Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the use of forensic genetic genealogy (FGG). In 1963 a toddler bundled in a quilt was found in a reservoir Jackson County, southern Oregon. At the time, “investigators used everything in their power to try and determine who this little boy was,” but they had no success. They ended up burying him in a burial plot. They called him Baby Boy Doe. 

Though the case had been revisited time and time again by law enforcement in Jackson County, “we knew we had new DNA resources at that point that could provide more information on this little guy,” Vance says. 

Working with Parabon NanoLabs, they uploaded his DNA profile to GEDmatch, and NCMEC created and nationally distributed a reconstructed illustration of his face, hoping to trigger someone’s recollection. FGG is a new method of identification that uses public genetic databases such as Family Tree and GEDmatch to find family members of the unidentified person to home in on their identity. FGG essentially applies the same technology these platforms use for criminal casework.

“Thanks to FGG, we were able to narrow down what family he came from,” Vance says. Investigators then approached family members and asked if a little boy had gone missing way back in 1962. One family member who remembered such a boy agreed to provide an oral swab DNA sample for kinship inference testing, and turned out to be the child’s half-sibling. Soon enough, they identified the child: 2-year-old Stevie Crawford, who’d been born in New Mexico in 1960. His family had moved to Jackson County shortly before his death, and they left again soon after he died. While his identity has been confirmed, the circumstances of his death remain unknown. 

“Solving that cold case was bittersweet,” Vance says. “A relative came forward and told us about how she had loved Stevie Crawford. She had played with him every day. Those types of memories from a family member are really poignant. I was honored to be a part of solving his case, but it was also profoundly sad to finally realize who he was and what his very short life might have been like.”

Hope to I.D. more of the missing

About 4,400 unidentified bodies are found each year in the U.S., according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs). A year later, the identities of about 1,000 will still be unknown. 

In some ways, it isn’t surprising. People move away, start new lives, lose touch, may be marginalized by society and perhaps are estranged from their families. Such silence was especially more common before the internet and social media made it easier to track people down.  

But it also worries Vance in terms of new missing-person cases. “There is really this silent, catastrophic tragedy of people going missing every day,” she says. 

Of the more than 120 individuals Vance found back in 2004, about 30 have been identified. “One of the things that I think people need to be cognizant of is the fact that if a loved one is missing, you've got to report them to the law enforcement agency in that area where they went missing, because that's our first step,” she says. 

“If we don't know they're missing, they are a mystery to us. If we have no idea of their disappearance, we therefore have nothing to compare to the remains in our facility.”

Now there are more opportunities to I.D. the missing than ever before. DNA phenotyping, which gives information like eye, skin and hair color, and ancestry, has been an enormous boon to the field.

The future of forensics

In one case, Vance had to identify someone based on the discovery of a single skeletonized foot in a boot. Thanks to phenotyping, they were able to tell investigators that the foot had belonged to a man of European ancestry who’d had brown hair and brown eyes.
Unfortunately, that’s all they know about him so far. But for Vance, the idea that she could learn the hair and eye color of someone based on a sliver of his heel bone was unthinkable when she began this work.

Kintelligence is just one of the “outstanding” advances in DNA technology that Vance has seen since she got her start in forensics. “The types of DNA analysis that we can do on bone material has widened all of the experiences that we can have and the conclusions that we can make with these really cold unsolved cases,” she says. 

Kintelligence targets 10,230 SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) that are the most useful markers for kinship. (Most commercial DNA kits look at as many as 300,000 SNPs.) This means significantly less DNA is needed for successful analysis.

FGG has also revolutionized the field. “It’s a wonderful type of analysis that we had never used before 2019,” she says. “And we're so fortunate to be able to use it now to resolve some of these cases, as it has proven extremely effective.”

“That dignity, isn't quite there yet until we give them a first and last name,” explains Vance. “And that's what is so important about this job. There's nothing I can do to assist them in life, but if I can assist them in death, provide them with a name, and compassionately release them to family, then that's a really big responsibility that I am honored to take on.”